Recyclable materials include glass bottles, plastic bottles, and aluminum cans. These types of bottles and cans are delivered to recycling centers which will pay a specific price for each type of recyclable material. Plastic bottles and aluminum cans need to be inspected before they are weighed. In a typical transaction a customer comes to a recycling center with his or her recyclables in plastic garbage bags. The customer sorts the material, placing aluminum cans and plastic bottles into separate wire baskets or containers. These wire baskets are then weighed and the customer is paid according to the price per pound for the specific material.
Some customers perform properly when sorting their plastic bottles and aluminum cans, making sure they are empty. Other customers inadvertently mix items or have liquid in the bottle or can. And yet others intentionally include foreign materials and contaminants in the bottles or cans or in the wire basket in an attempt to receive more money as a result of the increased weight produced by the foreign materials or contaminants.
The use of wire baskets helps in the visual inspection of the recyclables, but is insufficient for adequate identification of foreign materials and contaminants. At present, it takes two people to inspect a customer's recyclables, one who slowly pours the recyclables from a full wire basket into an empty wire basket while another grabs problem materials and discards them. At other times, when bottles or cans are filled with water, these recyclables must be poured several times from one basket to another, whereby the tumbling of the recyclables helps remove the water. Since the baskets weigh about twenty pounds empty and hold up to fifty pounds of recyclables, the present method of inspecting, sorting out foreign materials, and emptying a basket of a specific recyclable into a receiving container is relatively labor intensive, time consuming, and expensive.
There are dumping devices known which are rotatable within the structure which supports them, but they function like rotatable wheel barrows. They are not designed to hold containers such as wire baskets for recyclable materials. What is needed is a holder for recyclable baskets or containers that will allow a single user to rotate the container so that the single user can pour, sort, and/or tumble the recyclable material quickly with little effort.